Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Moviegoer, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Value Systems
Women, Love, and Sex
Modern Life and the Search for Meaning
Loss, Suffering, and Death
Summary
Analysis
Binx awakens to the grating noise of two men starting an outboard motor on a boat. Below, in the foggy swamp, his stepfather, Roy Smith, curses as he wrestles with the motor. Soon it roars to life, and he and his companion disappear into the mist. Moments later, Binx’s mother emerges yawning from the house with a fishing pole. Binx joins her on the dock. When Binx tells her he doesn’t care for fishing, his mother says he’s just like his father. She tells a story about when Binx’s father tried to take up fishing but abandoned the new hobby after one successful outing, instead reverting to his customary walk along the levee, the same long miles day after day.
Binx’s conversation with his mother yields insights into his character. She recalls Binx’s father as having a restless personality, briefly enthusiastic about things yet always falling back on a familiar, plodding pattern, as though looking for something. This is somewhat like Binx’s restless search, carried out against the backdrop of a predictable, tidy life.
Themes
Binx tries to ask more personal questions—like if his father was a good husband—but his mother avoids them with glib jokes. Her memories seem to be of an image of Binx’s father, not the man himself. But then she remembers another story. Once, she tells Binx, his father was too sick to eat, and he lost 30 pounds. She got him to eat by spoon-feeding him while reading him a novel. She explains that Binx’s father didn’t eat because he didn’t feel it was important enough. He had an overwrought nervous system, she explains. The next time his father got sick, the only thing that helped him was enlisting in the war.
Binx’s mother communicates through roundabout stories, and she shares Aunt Emily’s tendency to describe people the way she’d prefer to remember them; yet her answers reveal that Binx really is like his father. Like Binx, his father seems to have been disturbed by a perceived lack of meaning in ordinary things—a tendency his wife didn’t understand but could respond to in practical ways.
Themes
Binx tells his mother what happened to him in the Korean War. He describes how he got injured during the war and, while in the ditch, he remembered that he was supposed to have warned a nearby Ranger company about the enemy position, but suddenly nothing seemed worth doing. In fact, if Binx had been told that he could find a cure for cancer within 40 minutes if he’d only put forth the effort, he would not have tried. At the time, nothing seemed good enough for him. His mother isn’t really following the story. She remarks that Binx would be good at cancer research.
Binx tries to explain his search to his mother, but this is pointless; Binx’s mother doesn’t understand him any better than Aunt Emily does. Like his aunt, she thinks that Binx has unfulfilled potential, which could be realized if he just settled into the right work. Her own value system, like Emily’s, is settled, which makes his search for meaning difficult for her to comprehend.
Themes
